Displaying posts published in

May 2025

ISRAEL Comments turned off

POSITIVE NEWS FROM ISRAEL FROM MICHAEL ORDMAN

By on May 11th, 2025

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com

Today, in the Gatestone Institute Raymond Ibrahim asks: “380,000,000 Christians Persecuted for ‘Their Faith’: Where Is the Outrage?” https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21585/christians-persecuted

Well, the outrage is aroused only about Israel and its defense struggle against genocidal enemies. rsk

Another week where the media has again put tiny Israel “front & center” almost to the exclusion of any other major world events.  This newsletter highlights Israel’s positive achievements and activities in the past week, that far outweigh its size. Michael Ordman

POSITIVE NEWS IN A WAR
 
IDF soldier’s Righteous great-grandparents. Noah’s great-grandparents hid a Jewish woman in their attic in the Netherlands during WWII. Her great-grandmother’s brother hid a Jewish couple and their three children, earning recognition as “Righteous of the Nations”. Today, Noah is proud to serve as a soldier in the IDF.
https://unitedwithisrael.org/watch-how-an-idf-soldiers-great-grandparents-saved-jews-during-the-holocaust/
 
Saving the Syrian Druze. The Ziv Medical Center in Safed has admitted 32 injured Druze, victims of fighting in Syria during the past week. They include two pregnant women. The IDF has also has established a forward mobile medical triage facility near the Syrian village of Hader and is also protecting the Druze from massacres.
https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/middle-east/levant-turkey/artc-32-syrian-druze-so-far-treated-in-israeli-hospital   https://www.jns.org/idf-sets-up-field-triage-facility-for-syrian-druze-civilians/
https://www.jns.org/idf-strikes-in-syria-amid-violence-against-druze-community/
 
A French exoskeleton in Israel. An IDF soldier, severely wounded in Gaza, took his first steps in recovery at Sheba Medical Center. Sheba is one of the few places in the world that offers the Atalante X robotic exoskeleton developed by the French-American company Wandercraft.
https://unitedwithisrael.org/severely-injured-idf-soldier-walks-again-thanks-to-robotic-exoskeleton/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_xnLd4yqDg
 
Chai. In celebration of Israel’s 77th Independence Day, internationally acclaimed singer Netta Barzilai has partnered with the Jewish Agency for Israel to release a new rendition of the iconic Israeli anthem “Chai.” The 1983 Eurovision Song has been reimagined to reflect Israel’s resilience in the face of current challenges.
https://www.jns.org/netta-barzilai-teams-up-with-jewish-agency-to-drop-independence-day-tune/
 
Look! How marvelous our people are.  (TY Ted Belman & Rhoda) Great article by Arlene Kushner highlighting Israeli resilience.  https://arlenefromisrael.info/look-how-marvelous-our-people-are/
 
Chance Gaza border encounter leads to new VC. “Only in Israel” story where a meeting between two IDF reservists resulted in the founding of Venture Capital organization TBC VC that has raised $35 million in three months for investment in Israeli startups. It will also donate money to non-profit Gav Lalohem to help others.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/35-million-vc-fund-launches-thanks-to-reservists-chance-encounter-on-the-gaza-border/   https://www.gavla.org.il/gav-lalohem-ngo-2024/
 
Help support therapy for Israeli soldiers. Beit Binyamin, near the spiritual town of Tzfat, is a therapeutic respite center for IDF soldiers and their families, displaced families and struggling spouses and parents.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysXhDvC7PpA  https://causematch.com/beitbinyamin25/igno/
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DEKpADkRdfV/?igsh=a3pucm90NW91dGd1 https://beitbinyamin.org/
 
 
ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS
 
Successful life-support treatment. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s Inspira Technologies (see here previously) used its INSPIRA ART100 system at Westchester Medical Center, New York to circulate and oxygenate a patient’s blood. It marked the first real-world implementation of Inspira’s innovative life-support technology.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/inspira-technologies-announces-successful-treatment-123000786.html
 
Safer cardiac treatment. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s CardioVia has just received U.S. FDA clearance for its ViaOne system. It provides safe (no needle) access to the pericardium – the thin sac protecting the heart where new minimally invasive treatments are having much success over conventional, risky, heart surgery.
https://www.cardiovia.com/
 
Breakthrough treatment for massive blood loss. (TY Ron M) Researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the IDF’s Medical Corps have discovered a peptide to activate Protein Kinase C-epsilon (PKC-ε) and significantly improve survival rates of patients (including wounded soldiers) who suffer massive blood loss.
https://www.ynetnews.com/health_science/article/bkler7vgxg
 
Monitoring vital signs from a distance. During the Covid-19 epidemic, Professor Yonina Eldar of Israel’s Weizmann Institute led the development of radar technology to remotely check health. Her lab has unveiled BRAHMS, the Bio-Radar Health Monitoring System which uses AI to analyze subtle chest movements.
https://www.israel21c.org/noncontact-radar-unit-monitors-patients-vitals-remotely/
https://www.weizmann.ac.il/math/yonina/manya-igel-center-biomedical-engineering-and-signal-processing
 
Live long and prosper. Researchers from Israel’s Bar-Ilan University have analyzed the differences in protein sequences across mammals with varying lifespans. They discovered that long-lived whales and humans have specific post-translational modifications (PTMs) that may protect against age-related diseases (e.g. cancer).
https://www.newswise.com/articles/new-research-reveals-nature-s-secret-to-healthy-longevity
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-58762-x.epdf
 
How bacteria take control of infected cell. Scientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have discovered that the protein CsrA in bacteria creates a “control center” inside a cell that manages the activation of disease-causing genes. Future treatments that disable the control center should stop infections before they take hold.
https://www.afhu.org/2025/04/29/a-hidden-control-center-how-bacteria-regulate-their-attack-strategies/
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-58829-9#Sec2
 
$125 million donation to Tel Aviv University. Blackstone Investment firm president Jonathan Gray and his wife Mindy are donating $125 million to Tel Aviv University’s Faculty of Medicine – the largest donation in the university’s history – to increase the number of doctors in Israel. The faculty will now bear the couple’s name.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/blackstone-president-to-donate-125-million-to-tel-aviv-universitys-medical-school-nyt/  https://israfan.com/p/blackstone-gray-donation-tel-aviv-university
 
Celebrating Life. US ambassador Mike Huckabee received a United Hatzalah Defender of Israel Award at a special celebration for the Israel’s emergency response organization at the Museum of Tolerance Jerusalem. He recounted the time when a UH responder saved the life of one of the delegates of a mission he was leading.
https://www.jns.org/huckabee-united-hatzalah-is-an-organization-worth-celebrating/
 

Continue reading →
WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Human Rights NGOs: A Crisis of Trust – The Root Causes and Recommended Remedies Dr Helena Ivanov

By on May 11th, 2025

https://henryjacksonsociety.org/publications/human-rights-ngos-a-crisis-of-trust-the-root-causes-and-recommended-remedies/

Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are facing a deepening crisis of trust, with confidence in them steadily declining on a number of fronts across both developed and developing countries according to survey data. This erosion of trust threatens their ability to operate effectively. This report seeks to analyse the origins of this crisis of trust and offer targeted policy recommendations for NGOs. If implemented, these measures should help restore confidence in the sector, allowing it to carry out its vital work more effectively.  

The crisis of trust has worsened over the last few years. For instance, significant doubt surrounds the conduct and research of human rights NGOs towards Israel, particularly since the 7 October attacks. As Michael Powell tells us in his recent The Atlantic article: “organizations that explicitly valued impartiality and independence have become stridently critical of Israel.” In the same article, Powell argues that human rights organisations frequently apply double standards. He highlights how once-impartial groups, such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, which originally pursued clear and principled objectives, have become increasingly biased – particularly in their approach to the Israel–Hamas war. 

This report does not aim to assess the validity of the accusations of bias against these NGOs. Instead, it argues that the mere presence and frequency of such comments contribute to a substantial erosion of trust in the NGO sector. In a conflict where the stakes are so high, and given the critical role that NGOs play in protecting human rights both in times of peace and war, it is essential to find a way to address these concerns and restore genuine confidence in the work of these organisations.  

Another factor contributing to this erosion of trust is the increasing perception of double standards. When NGOs focus on and push for the highest ethical standards for Western companies, they create a perception that they are inadvertently distorting developing markets and contributing to worsening human rights conditions on the ground – as their activities result in critical strategic assets and operations being taken over by Chinese, Russian or other similarly less scrupulous entities.  

Continue reading →
WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Power in a Papal Name By choosing the name Leo, Pope Prevost may be signaling a nod to both workers’ rights and world-saving diplomacy—channeling popes who spoke to chaos with clarity. By Roger Kimball

By on May 11th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/05/11/the-power-in-a-papal-name/

What’s in a name?

We all know that Juliet gave us this classic line, noting that (I paraphrase) even if you called a rose a hippopotamus, it would still smell as sweet as it did before you called it a river horse.

Things did not work out so well for that young Capulet, however, and the world at large has often taken a different view of names, according them an almost talismanic power.

Is that rational? You might as well ask, “Is the Pope Catholic?” which brings me to my theme.

When, to the surprise of many, the Chicago-born Robert Francis Prevost got the nod from the College of Cardinals, the white smoke had not yet dissipated before the world was atwitter about the name the first American Pope had chosen: Leo.

What did it mean? I canvassed several knowledgeable friends about our new Pope. The responses ranged from cautious optimism all the way to avid enthusiasm. “All early signs are very positive,” quoth one pal who worked in the Vatican for Pope Benedict. “I think he will be a great pope.”

Given the source, I take that as a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.

Many respondents, and much of the general media commentary, noted Prevost’s choice of “Leo” as his papal name. Was the choice significant? Most thought it was. And if it was significant, what did it mean?

Prevost is now Pope Leo XIV. Much media commentary speculated that Prevost chose the name in homage to (or inspired by) Pope Leo XIII, whose papacy ran from 1878 until his death in 1903.

Leo XIII has become known as “the Social Pope,” the “Pope of Workers.” His famous (in Catholic circles) encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891) was both a plea to address “the misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class” and a defense of private property. Leo rejected both socialism (“it is clear that the main tenet of socialism, community of goods, must be utterly rejected”) and the exploitation of the poor.

It is certainly possible that Prevost had Leo XIII in mind when he chose the name “Leo.” But I like to think that he might have harkened back to Leo the Great, the first Pope Leo, whose pontificate ran from AD 440 to 461.

Continue reading →
ISRAEL Comments turned off

No, Trump isn’t about to recognize a Palestinian state Ruthie Blum

By on May 11th, 2025

https://www.jns.org/no-trump-isnt-about-to-recognize-a-palestinian-state/

Non-Shabbat-observant Israelis awoke on Saturday to fake news that, in Winston Churchill’s witty words, “got halfway around the world before the truth had a chance to put its pants on.”  

The baloney began with coverage by i24News of an item that appeared in The Jerusalem Post. So much of the Hebrew channel’s morning broadcast was devoted to what it was touting as a huge deal that other outlets picked it up and ran with it.

Ditto for social media, of course.

The trouble is that everything about the bulletin was wrong, starting with an inaccurate attribution of its origin. Indeed, anybody who bothered to check could see that the piece in the JPost was a reprint of a write-up in The Media Line.

Perhaps one could chalk the mix-up to lazy journalism. But the depiction of the story’s content—about U.S. President Donald Trump’s imminent trip to the Middle East—doesn’t warrant even that much of an ill-deserved pass.

The chyron of the TV segment was: “Report: Trump to recognize a Palestinian state.”

Naturally, a flurry of panic or glee ensued, depending on the views of those highlighting the “scoop.” Yet all one had to do was peruse the article to realize that there’s “no there there.”

It isn’t until the fifth paragraph that the author, Ali Hussain, mentions the controversial topic. The passage, which opens with a question in bold letters (“Will Donald Trump recognize a Palestinian state?”), reads as follows:

“A Gulf diplomatic source, who declined to be named or disclose his position, told The Media Line, ‘President Donald Trump will issue a declaration regarding the State of Palestine and American recognition of it, and that there will be the establishment of a Palestinian state without the presence of Hamas.’

“The source also added, ‘If an announcement of American recognition of the State of Palestine is made, it will be the most important declaration that will change the balance of power in the Middle East, and more countries will join the Abraham Accords.’”

An anonymous source from an unnamed country surmising about something that hasn’t happened isn’t news. Nor does Hussain claim that it is.

In fact, he goes on to cite others—on the record—refuting the above. One is U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, who “denied the statements made by this source on X/Twitter Saturday afternoon, saying that Israel has no better friend than the U.S.”

Continue reading →
WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

380,000,000 Christians Persecuted for ‘Their Faith’: Where Is the Outrage? by Raymond Ibrahim

By on May 11th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21585/christians-persecuted

The top 13 of the 50 nations on the World Watch List 2025 are characterized by the worst form of persecution: “extreme.” They are: 1) North Korea, 2) Somalia, 3) Yemen, 4) Libya, 5) Sudan, 6) Eritrea, 7) Nigeria, 8) Pakistan, 9) Iran, 10) Afghanistan, 11) India, 12) Saudi Arabia, and 13) Myanmar.

[M]ost of the “extreme persecution” meted out to Christians in nine of these 13 worst nations continues to come either from Islamic oppression, or occurs in nations with large Muslim populations. Significantly, this means that approximately 70% of the absolute worst (“extreme”) persecution around the globe takes place under the aegis, or in the name, of Islam.

[T]he persecution of Christians by Muslims is perennial, existential, and far transcends this or that ruler or regime. Persecution of the “other” in Islam is part of its history, doctrines and socio-political makeup — hence its tenacity and ubiquity

“More believers are killed for their faith in Nigeria than anywhere else in the world.” — World Watch List 2025.

“[R]oughly a quarter of all blasphemy accusations [in Pakistan] target Christians, who make up just 1.8 percent of the population. Blasphemy laws carry a death sentence.” — World Watch List 2025.

“In Afghanistan, leaving Islam… and conversion is punishable by death under Islamic law. This has been increasingly enforced since the Taliban took control of the country in 2021.” — World Watch List 2025.

Even in nations that would appear to be friendly or at least neutral to Christianity, such as Cuba, Mexico and Nicaragua, Christians are being abused for their faith…

In 2024, around the world, 4,476 Christians — more than 12 a day on average — were “killed for faith related reasons.” Another 4,744 Christians were arrested or illegally detained, and 7,679 churches and other Christian institutions were attacked, often destroyed.

Overall, the global persecution of Christians has reached unprecedented levels. “More than 380m Christians suffer high levels of persecution and discrimination for their faith,” according to the World Watch List 2025 (WWL) published earlier this year by the international human rights organization, Open Doors.

Every year, the WWL ranks the top 50 nations in which Christians are the most persecuted for their faith. The data is compiled by thousands of grassroots workers and external experts. The latest edition of the WWL covers October 1, 2023 to September 30, 2024.

Continue reading →
HISTORY Comments turned off

The Daring Polish Resistance Fighter Who Volunteered to Be Sent to Auschwitz So He Could Sabotage the Nazi Death Camp From the Inside Witold Pilecki smuggled reports about Germany’s war crimes to the Allies, urging them to stop the atrocities at Auschwitz by bombing the camp. But his warnings went unheeded Paul Hockenos

By on May 11th, 2025

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-daring-polish-resistance-fighter-who-volunteered-to-be-sent-to-auschwitz-so-he-could-sabotage-the-nazi-death-camp-from-the-inside-180986559/?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us

“Pilecki’s life ended on a particularly bitter and darkly ironic note. As a man who had fought colonial and imperial lordship over Poland his entire life, he saw the Soviet occupation of his homeland after World War II as just another incarnation of foreign dictatorship. He went underground again, fighting until the Soviet-allied Polish secret police arrested him in May 1947. His own statesmen jailed and tortured him for over a year before executing him by firing squad on May 25, 1948. He was 47 years old.”

In September 1940, the Polish underground resistance fighter Witold Pilecki undertook a monumental act of bravery: He volunteered to allow the Nazi forces occupying Poland to arrest him, in the expectation that they would incarcerate him in the Auschwitz concentration camp.

At the time, the newly constructed Nazi facility in southern Poland hadn’t yet assumed its ultimate incarnation as Adolf Hitler’s seminal death camp. The internment center functioned more like a prison for convicted German criminals; a small number of Jews; and Polish oppositionists, including members of the Secret Polish Army, Pilecki’s outfit. Yet from its first days, Auschwitz bore a reputation for extreme brutality.

The Polish underground initially hoped that it could liberate Auschwitz from within the camp’s walls. The clandestine network selected Pilecki, a 39-year-old veteran and fervent Polish nationalist, to infiltrate Auschwitz, report on its operations and organize fellow prisoners with the object of overthrowing the German camp’s superintendents. Pilecki, the secret army’s chief of staff, carried out this Hail Mary mission over a period of two and a half years. Although the Polish freedom fighters couldn’t incapacitate the Nazis’ operation, Pilecki and his cohorts smuggled descriptive reports out of the facility as it morphed into Europe’s most heinous death factory, where more than 1.1 million people died, nearly one million of them Jews.

Over the course of 1942, Pilecki correctly grasped why the Nazis were enlarging the camp complex by adding gas chambers and crematoriums. He repeatedly urged the Polish exile government in London to convince the United Kingdom’s Royal Air Force to bomb Auschwitz, even if it meant killing innocent victims in the camp, including himself. Pilecki’s reports provided some of the earliest evidence of the Nazi death camps and their function in what the Nazis labeled the “Final Solution,” or the extermination of Europe’s Jews, known since as the Holocaust.

Pilecki’s credentials made him a logical candidate for this harrowing job of subterfuge and sabotage. Born in 1901 to patriotic Polish Catholics living in the Russian Empire, the teenage Pilecki served as a scout for Polish self-defense units during World War I. After the global conflict ended in 1918, he fought in a cavalry unit in the Polish-Soviet War, a 1919 to 1921 conflict between Polish nationalist forces and the Soviet Red Army over territory in present-day Ukraine and Belarus. While serving as a reserve officer in the mid-1920s, he took over his family’s estate, and in 1931, he married elementary school teacher Maria Ostrowska. The couple had two children; Pilecki painted and wrote poetry in his free time.

But Hitler’s war machine shattered the family’s harmony. On September 1, 1939, the Nazis invaded Poland, and two weeks later, the Soviets attacked from the east. Pilecki mobilized a reserve unit of local men he’d trained over the summer, but most of them were “peasants who had never seen action or fired a gun in anger,” writes journalist Jack Fairweather in The Volunteer: One Man, an Underground Army and the Secret Mission to Destroy Auschwitz. In a little over a month, the Polish Army was defeated, and the country of Poland came under Nazi and Soviet occupation.

Pilecki, like thousands of other Polish soldiers and civilians, joined an underground opposition that battled the occupiers from forests, sewer systems and cellars, notes a permanent exhibition on Pilecki’s life at the Pilecki Institute in Berlin.

Continue reading →
ISRAEL, MEDIA Comments turned off

A new low for the Pulitzer Prize How gross to give the commentary prize to a man who denigrated the Israeli hostages. Brendan O’Neill

By on May 11th, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/05/09/a-new-low-for-the-pulitzer-prize/

Back in normal times, many moons ago, it was frowned upon to denigrate women who’d been kidnapped by violent men. It would have been seen as especially sick to disparage women who’d been seized by an army of anti-Semites during a bloody carnival of Jew-killing. Speaking ill of such victims would likely have earned you scorn in decent society. Not anymore. Now it wins you the Pulitzer Prize.

This year’s Pulitzer Prize for Commentary has gone to Mosab Abu Toha, a writer from Gaza who lives in the US. The prize is overseen by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. The judges praised Abu Toha’s essays in the New Yorker for showing the world ‘the physical and emotional carnage in Gaza’. They had rather less to say about his online hysterics, in which he called Israeli hostages ‘killers’ and denounced the BBC as ‘filthy people’ for daring to suggest the Bibas kids were murdered by Hamas.

The sleuths over at the Honest Reporting website have uncovered Abu Toha’s digital bitching. And it ain’t pretty. He flipped following the release of the British-Israeli hostage Emily Damari in January this year. ‘How on Earth is this girl called a hostage?’, he asked on Facebook. She’s a ‘soldier’, he said, who had been ‘detained’ by Hamas. And ‘this is the case [for] most of the “hostages”’.

Note those scare quotes. It’s amazing how hateful punctuation can be. The implication was as clear as it was vile: these aren’t real hostages. They’re not innocents. They’re occupiers who were taken as prisoners of war by Hamas. Here, Abu Toha both legitimised Hamas, treating it as a normal army doing normal army things, and denigrated the hostages, even going so far as to rob them of that title. ‘Soldiers’, ‘occupiers’ – ie, the fuckers had it coming.

Continue reading →
EDUCATION, HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

INVESTIGATION: Uncovering Chinese Academic Espionage at Stanford

By on May 11th, 2025

https://stanfordreview.org/investigation-uncovering-chinese-academic-espionage-at-stanford/

This summer, a CCP agent impersonated a Stanford student. Under the alias Charles Chen, he approached several students through social media. Anna*, a Stanford student conducting sensitive research on China, began receiving unexpected messages from Charles Chen. At first, Charles’s outreach seemed benign: he asked about networking opportunities. But soon, his messages took a strange turn.

Charles inquired whether Anna spoke Mandarin, then grew increasingly persistent and personal. He sent videos of Americans who had gained fame in China, encouraged Anna to visit Beijing, and offered to cover her travel expenses. He would send screenshots of a bank account balance to prove he could buy the plane tickets. Alarmingly, he referenced details about her that Anna had never disclosed to him.

He advised her to enter China for only 24 to 144 hours, short enough, he said, to avoid visa scrutiny by authorities, and urged her to communicate exclusively via the Chinese version of WeChat, a platform heavily monitored by the CCP. When Charles commented on one of her social media posts, asking her to delete screenshots of their conversations, she knew this was serious. 

Under the guidance of experts familiar with espionage tactics, Anna contacted authorities. Their investigation revealed that Charles Chen had no affiliation with Stanford. Instead, he had posed as a Stanford student for years, slightly altering his name and persona online, targeting multiple students, nearly all of them women researching China-related topics. According to the experts on China who assisted Anna, Charles Chen was likely an agent of the Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS), tasked with identifying sympathetic Stanford students and gathering intelligence.

Continue reading →
POLITICS Comments turned off

After papal election, Liz Cheney demonstrates how Trump continues to live rent-free inside her head By Monica Showalter

By on May 11th, 2025

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/05/after_papal_election_liz_cheney_demonstrates_how_trump_continues_to_live_rent_free_inside_her_head.html

With Pope Leo XIV’s election in the Vatican, politicians and world leaders of all kinds moved to deliver their congratulations, extending their best wishes.

But then there’s Liz Cheney, still dreaming of Donald Trump over anything else, even a papal election.

She actually tweeted this:

It’s always all about Trump with her, isn’t it?

Instead of congratulating the new pope, she tried to compare President Trump to him unfavorably, the one all full of ‘grace, humility, mercy, and faith’ and the other full of ‘depraved cruelty, corruption and shame,’ none of which is remotely true. The two might actually become friendly which would probably give Liz the vapors.

The whole post stinks because it’s focused on who’s the more famous one. Things like this are irrelevant to all but the most fevered swamp-dwellers, keeping score of whose status is more important.

Continue reading →
WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Why Regime Change in Iran Is Becoming Inevitable Iran’s regime is crumbling under economic collapse, mass dissent, and regional isolation—making democratic transition less a question of if, and more of when. By Fariba Parsa

By on May 11th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/05/10/why-regime-change-in-iran-is-becoming-inevitable/

he Islamic Republic of Iran is facing unprecedented pressure from both within and outside its borders. Internally, economic collapse, widespread political disillusionment, and mass rejection of religious authoritarianism have profoundly weakened the regime’s legitimacy. Externally, Iran’s regional influence is diminishing as its proxies suffer military defeats and diplomatic isolation. Although the precise timing is uncertain, the convergence of these pressures makes regime change in Iran increasingly likely. For Western policymakers, this is not the time for short-term crisis management—it is the time to prepare for a democratic transition.

Internal Fault Lines
Popular Rejection of the Regime

Forty-six years after the Islamic Revolution, Iranian public sentiment has turned sharply against the ruling elite. A 2022 survey by the Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran GAMAAN found that nearly 90% of Iranians do not support the Islamic Republic as a system of governance. Additionally, 73% of respondents favor the separation of religion from politics—directly opposing the regime’s theocratic foundations. Calls for secular democracy and respect for human rights transcend ideological boundaries. Opposition comes from a wide range of constituencies—women’s rights activists, students, laborers, ethnic minorities, monarchists, secular republicans, and even traditional religious groups. The 2022–2023 “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests, sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini while in morality police custody, revealed a society no longer willing to endure repression. The Islamic regime is increasingly unable to enforce its compulsory hijab law, as millions of Iranian women openly defy it. At the same time, hardline factions within the regime are pressuring authorities to crack down and strictly implement the law. Yet the regime finds itself paralyzed—unable either to grant women the freedom to choose their clothing or to return to the mass arrests and repression of earlier years. The gulf between state and society has grown irreparably wide. Reform is no longer seen as a viable option. Today, the Iranian people themselves pose the greatest threat to the regime’s survival—more so than any external actor.

Economic Collapse and Systemic Corruption

Continue reading →